ch would have
crushed any system that had been less firmly fixed in the hearts of the
people. At the inauguration of Washington the foreign relations of the
country were few and its trade was repressed by hostile regulations; now
all the civilized nations of the globe welcome our commerce, and their
governments profess toward us amity. Then our country felt its way
hesitatingly along an untried path, with States so little bound together
by rapid means of communication as to be hardly known to one another,
and with historic traditions extending over very few years; now
intercourse between the States is swift and intimate; the experience of
centuries has been crowded into a few generations, and has created an
intense, indestructible nationality. Then our jurisdiction did not reach
beyond the inconvenient boundaries of the territory which had achieved
independence; now, through cessions of lands, first colonized by Spain
and France, the country has acquired a more complex character, and has
for its natural limits the chain of lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and on
the east and the west the two great oceans. Other nations were wasted by
civil wars for ages before they could establish for themselves the
necessary degree of unity; the latent conviction that our form of
government is the best ever known to the world has enabled us to emerge
from civil war within four years with a complete vindication of the
constitutional authority of the General Government and with our local
liberties and State institutions unimpaired.

The throngs of emigrants that crowd to our shores are witnesses of the
confidence of all peoples in our permanence. Here is the great land of
free labor, where industry is blessed with unexampled rewards and the
bread of the workingman is sweetened by the consciousness that the cause
of the country "is his own cause, his own safety, his own dignity." Here
everyone enjoys the free use of his faculties and the choice of activity
as a natural right. Here, under the combined influence of a fruitful
soil, genial climes, and happy institutions, population has increased
fifteen-fold within a century. Here, through the easy development of
boundless resources, wealth has increased with twofold greater rapidity
than numbers, so that we have become secure against the financial
vicissitudes of other countries and, alike in business and in opinion,
are self-centered and truly independent. Here more and more care is
given to pro